Current day server management techniques have largely gone backwards to manual and scripting methods. The most critical reason for this is the cloud. The cloud creates a completely different dynamic where servers can be located anywhere in the world. As James mentioned yesterday, rather than scaling up and buying bigger, more powerful hardware, and putting it in a central location, many people are now scaling out, adding more and more cheap servers to solve complex problems.

Traditional server management solutions were designed without thorough contemplation of these completely different characteristics of an IT environment. Legacy solutions assumed much greater control over the environment that servers lived within. As a result, organizations today are relying more heavily on manual management and scripting.

Open source software and SaaS-based services are emerging to help support these efforts in a number of areas in the server lifecycle with some specifically targeting server management. For example, some of these solutions are focused point solutions that will target specific tasks such as off-loading and storage of logs. Unfortunately, few providers have tackled creating a comprehensive, deep server management solution that works well for the cloud, and that’s where JumpCloud comes in.

Horizontal scaling (lots of servers, each one not all that powerful or necessarily critical – versus the old model of vertical scaling – heavy duty hardware where each server is super critical to the infrastructure) through the cloud is disrupting the IT environment, but Jumpcloud is creating a framework that enables admins to manage their cloud servers from one central console and orchestrate their servers to run jobs as either programs or scripts in any language that the server can support. Instead of spending time manual management and scripting, Jumpcloud provides automation capabilities for both server orchestration and user management functionalities in our web-based portal making server management from the cloud simple.